Blackout during playback on Apple TV

[zamboknee]

Was watching 'Slow Horses' on Apple TV+ through my Apple TV (A2843, tvOS 18.6) when a couple moments in the show the picture went black. Audio was fine but video went to black for a couple of seconds.



I rewatched the scenes in question on the Apple TV app on my phone and NO BLACKOUTS.



This has only happened on the Apple TV app on my Apple TV device.



I've had separate issues on different apps on the TV device (Disney+ shows/movies taking forever to play) and a few months ago there was no signal coming from the device to the TV set. I switched out the HDMI cable and that seemed to fix THAT problem.



Is my Apple TV device going bad? Is there a known issue with the Apple TV+ app?



Thanks for any insight here.

 

[Kpete]

This is happening to us currently.

 

[waw74]

it's possible there's a bad file somewhere that your aTV is streaming, but your phone isn't

Also if you're using match range, it's possible a singe bad frame could cause it to drop out of HDR, which could cause your TV to drop to black for a few seconds. Does the HDR/DV badge popup when you start the show? does It also appear right after the blackouts. Phones can handle this better since they dont' really switch range.

the streaming services will have multiple copies of each show at different resolutions and bandwidths. That way they can just stream the 4k file to a player that can handle it. But if the player is only 1080, they can stream the 1080 file instead of having to convert on the fly on their end (using extra processing power), or use extra bandwidth and have you down-scale at your end.

there's also a chance your phone and aTV are streaming from different places. Apple and the other streamers will have servers scattered everywhere with potentially copies of the same file on multiple servers at that same location. Sometimes the can locate servers in the major ISP hubs, to cut down on bandwidth.


so even though you're watching the same show on multiple devices, there's a decent chance you're actually not watching the same file.

 

[StudioMacs]

I think I replied to you on the Apple discussion forum, but I experienced this last night watching season 5 episode 1 of Slow Horses. This only happened watching Slow Horses, not any other shows.

I’m running tvOS 26.

Restarting the TV and Apple TV didn’t fix the issue.

 

[moonnavigator]

Am having screen blacking out for a second or two all over the place. Apple Fitness+, TV+, even content I stream from my Mac’s library. Restarting AppleTV seems to help but it eventually comes back.

Am running 26.1 beta 1.